Ubuntu – How to change ^ modifier in Ubuntu terminal to be tied to Alt key

keyboard-layoutshortcut-keys

EDIT 2

First, look at the bold part of my EDIT at the bottom! I think the original way I posed the question is confusing people.

I've followed the instructions here to switch my Alt and Ctrl keys. Now when in a terminal I want to press the physical Ctrl+C to cancel. But the new mapping means I physically press Alt+C.

I looked at the keyboard shortcuts for the terminal:

and can't find that shortcut there.

I am on Ubuntu 20

EDIT

I realised I might be confusing the problem by telling you I originally switched my Alt and Ctrl keys. You can mostly forget about that if it makes it easier. Think of the question as: "Instead of pressing ctrl+key in the terminal for things like process interruption (ctrl+C) or reverse search (ctrl+R) I want to press alt+key. How can I set that up without actually changing the system-wide key bindings in general?"

EDIT 3

Finally, if it helps to understand my motivation for wanting to do this: right now, under my key mapping I have to physically press Shift+Alt+C to copy from the terminal, whereas in every other app that I use I just press Alt+C. After months I still can't get the hang of mentally adjusting. I end up pressing Shift in my other apps, or cancelling things in my terminal by forgetting to press Shift in the terminal. It's driving me insane!

Another point on my motivation. I'm coming from being a mac user, where in the terminal you have to press physical Ctrl+C to cancel, and physical Cmd+C to copy. On a standard non-mac keyboard, the Cmd is in the same place as the Alt. That's why I've done my key mapping this way.

Best Answer

'How to swap alt-ctrl in the terminal?'

OS X has a handy feature that allows Command as Ctrl.
Basically Ctrl and C like key nodes can be understood by the terminal but Super can't be the same.
See https://superuser.com/questions/1178542/super-key-notation-for-stty

You can edit stty -a for example stty intr ^K now Control+K is an interrupt key and you lose ^K used to erase towards the end of line. But you can't do it any other mod keys Alt Esc.
In the other words, it is very risky to change the default key bind, for example, someone tries to replace ^M works as other things than "Return" and you can't execute any commands.
You can change other shortcuts in Terminal, they are shown in the shortcut menu on your question.
I recommend leave the principals (^C or ^R) untouched and change all other things.

Swap Ctrl and Alt systemside.

First reassign the Ctrl and Alt as you describe, using xmodkey or Gnome-Tweak Typing setting

I believe you already did this. Many other ways introduced
setxkbmap -layout 'us,us' -option 'ctrl:swap_lalt_lctl'

Using Alt key like the mac command (⌘) key for copy/paste

Swap physical keyboard layout

Now then, your Alt_L key is working as your Ctrl_L, and vice-versa.
Some keyboards are not allowed to replace keycaps, e.g. HHKB Pro cannot be done due to the different unit size.
However, most of keycaps are physically swap-able.

[ ctrl_c2

For fixing your terminal behaviour:

A straightforward way to achieve what you are trying to do, is to edit your home config files. For a bash terminal, you are looking to edit your readline config, which would be your .inputrc.

Open up a terminal
man readline This tells you most of your customization options. If you scroll to the bottom, it shows you how emacs mode is configured. More on that below.
gedit .inputrc This is what you want to edit. It is loaded whenever you log in, and will customize your readline (what bash uses for input) behaviour.

How I solved a similar issue.

I had to do something similar because I use Vi Mode in Bash:

set -o vi

I also use Colemak.
Subsequently, I use a highly customized version of Vim.

My .vimrc configuration does not affect vi Mode for bash (and ZSH for that matter).

So I had to create a custom one, and boy was it a lot of work:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~akiva/colemak.vim/trunk/view/head:/.inputrc

You can use my code there as a template to work off of. I have all the functions there. The ones I do not use are commented out. You can map your characters to two things:

########
# Copy #
########
# Copy to
"c":    vi-yank-to 
# fake copy line
"C":    "0c$$"

vi-yank-to is a builtin function
"0c$$" is a custom string (Notice the quotes around it) that basically simulates me pressing 0, c, $, $ in that order.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Ubuntu – How many keyboard key combinations are possible in Ubuntu

In the image below I have limited the number of keys by blacking out the ones that, in my opinion, would not really be used for this (enter,arrows, hardware etc) and coloured the keys to be modifiers in gray. This will give us a nice starting point.

This gives us, 6 modifier (mod) keys and 63 normal keys (key), so to get the amount of two key combinations we can do key*mod and get 378, call this A.

To get the number of three key combinations we have 6 mod keys and each can be paired with another, so each key can have 5 combos. If we do 6*5 we get 30 (com) and we can multiply this by key to get the number of three key combinations com*key is 1890 and call this B.

Finally we can add A to B and get the number of mappable shortcuts for Unity, within the given criteria.

A+B = 2268

To summarize:

mod*key + com*key = answer

You should be able to use this on any keyboard by assigning the numbers to the variables (key, mod, com) by counting them and then using the final equation to work out the number of possible shortcuts.

I am no mathematician but I think I did this right, please anyone feel free to tell me if I am not in the comments but I had to answer this, it was driving me nuts.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to achieve Mac-like use of CTRL and CMD keys on Apple Keyboard

For fixing your terminal behaviour:

How I solved a similar issue.

Ubuntu – How many keyboard key combinations are possible in Ubuntu

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